a lot of men died, but strategically, it was a victory. >> i characterize this entire campaign is being the most successful of this conflict thus far. its success is unprecedented. >> we are seeing americans come to grips with large-scale the enemies units. is is going to be a pattern of the war? >> it seems evident that the leadership in hanoi has sent down to south vietnam regular forces. how many more, we do not know. >> it was a bitter and valuable experience. it taught us the value of mobility in fighting a guerrilla war. it has also pointed out the brutal fact that hanoi intends to commit a filled army to vietnam. communists are massing in south vietnam, and so are we. they feel we are divided. there impressed by student demonstrations. in hanoi, a student is a rare and honored member of society. the enemy knows he cannot defeat us in the field, but by killing americans, he hopes to demoralize us at home. that is what happened to france in 1954. our armed forces are willing to take necessary casualties to seek out and destroy the enemy. the question remains, are the american people willing to lose more and more young men in vietnam? ♪ >> this has been a cbs news special report, the battle of ia drang valley. >> this prerecorded broadcast was produced under the supervision and control of cbs news. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] bookshelf history features popular history writers and airs on american history tv every weekend. next, danielle mcguire discusses the lives of women during the civil rights movement. this december marks the 60th anniversary of rosa parks' .efusal to give up her seat she examines racial and sexual violence experienced by african-american women in the segregated south year she credits women for fueling the civil rights movement. the georgia center for books hosted this event in 2010. it is a little over one hour. >> good evening, everyone. i'm the executive director of the george's for books. we have the host for this evening's program. we welcome all of you. rosa parks is one of the truly iconic figures of the civil rights movement. we know her as the older, quiet woman who's tired feet led her to defy segregation on buses iny alabama's 1955. her courageous spontaneous refusal to give up her seat to a white man sparked the bus boycott, which gave birth to an entire movement. that is what we have been told until now. but do we really know rosa parks? the answer is very definitely, no. theelcome to the center for book tonight, dr. danielle mcguire, and >> her new book is at the dark end at the street, black women, rate, and resistance." the bulge is not merely shed on rosa parks and the beginnings of the civil rights movement. it offers a new way of approaching an understanding the women's history and the underpinnings of the civil rights movement. it traces a sordid history of sexual violence directed against black women in the jim crow era and illuminates how the little-known actions of rosa parks long before that bus boycott helped create the impetus for civil rights movements. detailsin says the book the all too ignored tactic of rate of black women and the practice of southern white supremacy. and she plots resistance against the outrage as a fact of the civil rights movement. her book is as essential as its history is infuriating. dr. me in welcoming danielle maguire. [applause] thank you. thank you to the georgia center for the book for inviting me in the decatur public library for hosting us, and to all of you for bearing with me through this presentation. i am thrilled you are here tonight. 1944, in alabama, a black woman named recy taylor walked home from a church revival. a car load of white men kidnapped her, drove her to the woods, and brutally gang raped her. they dropped her in the middle of town and threatened to kill her if she told anyone what happened. that night she told her father, her husband, and the local sheriff the details of the brutal assault. pd said they were sending their best investigator. her name was rosa parks. it was 11 years before the bus boycott. activists would become better known as the montgomery improvement brought martin luther king jr. to prominence that would change the world. rosa parks carried her story back to montgomery where she and the most militant activists organized a national and international protests for equal .ustice for recy taylor they called it the best to be seen in a decade. when the coalition took root, it would become the montgomery improvement association, dr. king was still in high school. boycott montgomery bus often heralded as the opening scene of the civil rights drama was the last act of a decade-long struggle to protect african-american women from sexualized violence and rape. was notapping and rape unusual in the segregated south. from slavery through the 20th century, white men abducted and assaulted black women with alarming regularity and often impunity. they learned black women and girls away from work with promises of steady pay and better wages. they attacked them on the job. they objected them at gunpoint while traveling to or from home or work. they sexually humiliated, harassed, and assaulted them on buses, in theaters and other places of public space. this is a pattern throughout the underscore the limits of southern justice. black women did not keep their stories secret. they reclaim their humanity by testifying about these assaults, and their testimonies lead to larger campaigns for several rights and human dignity. even the most off told and illustrious campaign for civil rights, montgomery, birmingham, selma, the freedom summer in mississippi, they often have an unexamined history of gendered political appeals to protect black women from sexual violence. most of you here tonight probably know something about the montgomery bus boycott. according to popular history, who in what caused the boycott? anyone? rosa parks. what was it? to decide toer stay on the bus? she had tired feet. question, the same the former editor of the montgomery advertiser talks about somebody else, gertrude perkins. this is what he had to say. >> gertrude perkins is not even mentioned in the history books. she had as much to do with the bus boycott and its creation as anyone on earth. large, toshe loomed remember her 40 years after the fact when he gave this interview. most histories fail to even mention her name. if you are like me, when hearing this you are like whois gertrude perkins? african-american woman, 25 years old, of ducted and assaulted by two police officers in march 27 1929. -- 1939. >> two policemen picked her up on the railroad. they had all types of sexual relations with her at that particular time. she came to my door. she told me what had happened to her. i set down and wrote what she said had happened to her. word by word. finished, i had it to drewd and sentenced pearson in washington. he went to the air with it. it was all over the nation. >> after gertrude perkins said what happened she mustered the courage to report the crime to the police, even the same men who had raped her. not surprisingly the police dismissed her claim and accused her of lying. they claim she was completely false. holding a lineup would set a bad precedent. besides, my policeman would not do a thing like that. blacks in montgomery knew better. ae police force had reputation for racist and sexist brutality. a few years earlier police had abducted and raped a 16-year-old daughter of a black woman who challenge the police officer on the bus one day. spread,of the attack women, activists, labor leaders and ministers rally to her defense. they formed an upper-level organization and demanded an investigation and a trial. their public protests garnered enough attention to keep the story on the front pages of the for nearly newspaper two months. the sustained attention finally forced a grand jury hearing where she testified on her own behalf. the county solicitor accused her of lying. she stood her ground and maintained her composure. her testimony did not impact the all white jury, however, who failed to indict any officers. in the editorial designed to put any hard feelings to rest the montgomery advertiser said the case ran the full process of our anglo-saxon system of justice. what more could have been done? >> members of the citizens committee would have preferred an indictment and lengthy jail sentence but they were thrilled when the amount of public protest their campaign yielded. montgomery seemed to have more of its fair share of what were called sex cases. occur in did not isolation. in february 1951 a white grocery store owner reggie black teenager. or as amployed babysitter and frequently drove her home after her shift. one night he pulled to the side of the quiet road and raped her. that night she went home and told her parents what happened. they decided to press charges. when a jury returned a not guilty verdict after delivering for five minutes the family reached out to rufus lewis, a world war ii veteran. nexen organized a boycott his store. they brought together women's groups and the women's political counsel and labor unions, perhaps even the same people who had organized to defend recy taylor. they delivered their own verdict in the case. they drove grain into the red. storehut down his grocery . the ability to shut down his grocery store constituted a major victory. not only did it establish the boycott as a powerful weapon for a message tot sent wife that african-americans were no longer allow white men to disrespect, abuse, and violate black women bodies. besides police officers come if you were as guilty of these crimes as were the bus operators who bullied and brutalized black passengers daily. bus drivers had police power. they carried blackjacks, and often guns. they assaulted and sometimes even killed african-americans who violated the racial order of jim crow. in 1953 african-americans filed 30 complaints of abuse and mistreatment. most complaints came from black women, working-class women it who were domestics who made up the bulk of the ridership. drivers hurled nasty insults at black women, touch them inappropriately and often physically abused them. one woman remembering them sexy harassing her as she waited on the corner. the bus was up high, she said and the street was down low. they would drive up and expose themselves while i was standing there. it scared me to death. treatedremembered they them rough as can be, but we're some kind of animal. they denied a sense of dignity and demonstrated they were not worthy of respect or protection. this belief was part of a long-standing pattern that allowed white men to use and abuse black women for the better part of the 20th century. when we consider this within a spectrum of racial and sexual violence with rape and lynching on one end and daily indignities on the other, attacks on black women integrity underscores their physical and sexual vulnerability in a racial caste system. it was much easier not to mention safer for black women to just stop writing the buses than it was to bring their assailants , often bus drivers and police officers to justice. without these woman the bus .oycott would have failed african-american women ran the day-to-day operation of the boycott. they stopped the that started the car system. they raise most of the local money for the movement. they filled the majority of pews at the mass meetings with a testified publicly about physical and sexual abuse on the buses. by walking hundreds of miles to protest humiliation may african-american women reclaim their bodies and demanded to be treated with dignity and respect. while the mchenry bus boycott is often portrayed as a spontaneous movement, it has a past. it is rooted in the struggle to protect and defend black womanhood from racial and sexual violence. it's impossible to understand and situate the boycott in its proper historical context of the understanding the stories of recy taylor and gertrude perkins. this history, it's impossible for us to understand why so many black women walked for so long to protest mistreatment on the buses. the onlyr he was not place where a tax on black women the old protests against white supremacy. civil rights campaigns in little rock arkansas, where daisy bates used her newspaper for a decade to publicly shame white man was salted black women, or albany, georgia in 1962 where people defended black women at albany state black college for white men who broke into their dorms and proud around campus at night. alabamangham and selma whose police and bus drivers are notorious for racist and sexist practices. in the 1964ippi freedom summer where activists who were arrested were often beaten and sexually abuse while they were in prison. all of these major campaigns have roots in organize resistance to sexualized violence and gendered political appeals to defend black womanhood. this despite literature that focuses on the roles of black and white women and the outrage of gender in the movement, and sees little or no role in most histories of the freedom struggle, even as we focused on racist violence about lack and white man. all these provide gripping examples of racist brutality but we ignore what happened to black women. to truly understand the civil rights movement we need to understand the stories, and this history. the sexual exploitation of black women had its roots in slavery. stall black women's bodies to strengthen their power for two reasons. thenial laws meant offspring of slave women the property of their master, giving slave owners a financial incentive to abuse slaves. laws that banned interracial marriage but not fornication or childbirth out of wedlock awarded white men sexual access to black and white women while denying black women the respectability and rights granted by a legal relationship. these laws created a system allowed white men to police white women sexual choices and abuse black women with impunity. both of which maintained white men's position on topic political and economic power structure. after slavery fell, these practices often remains. reconstruction, slaveholders and sympathizers you'd violence to reassert control over freed people. andas a weapon of terror interracial rape became a battleground on which black men and women fought for ownership and control of their bodies. aserracial rape was deployed a justification for lynching black men who violated any aspect of the racial status quo even though they were often accused of attacking white women. control,in power and whites created the myth of the black beast rapists, per train them as a beast that attacked white women while they slept. they use this image whenever they feared losing power. for example, white democrats in north carolina use the image in 1900 to regain political control after the biracial fusion party took every single statewide office in 1898. wellsclub women like ida argued that white men accused black man of rape as part of larger system of intimidation. or they did this to match their own barbarism and attack on black women. she knew that white men attacked black women in a ritualistic fashion throughout the jim crow era. black women were victimized to be sure. the street isd of not just about victimization. many black women who were raped or insulted thought back by speaking out. tom the slave narratives gertrude perkins african-american women described in denounce their sexual misuse, deploying their voices as weapons in the wars against white supremacy. for every woman that spoke out, there were many more who kept these attacks to themselves. salads can be a useful strategy. especially when whites used racial violence to shore up white supremacy. for example, african-american leaders embrace the politics of respectability and adhered to a culture of silence as a matter of political necessity during the white backlash unleashed from the 1954 supreme court decision outlawing segregation in public schools. for many supporters, integration miscegenation, or as a mississippi judge put it, and malcolm nation -- amalgamation. they warned the incubus was coming. next marriage, black men girls.g whit raping white the citizens council leader espousing these feelings. ever give up that gun. that is all you have left to protect that little baby in the crib. these dirty devils will be in your homes. that is what they want. they do not want equality. the you know they don't want equality. they don't want something like you've got. they want what you've got, your women. because segregation has employed these scare tactics, particularly the myth of the black beast rapists, to cultivate white fear and resentment, any gender or racial impropriety on the part of african-americans could be viewed as threatening the social order. this is why african-americans chose rosa parks as he symbol of the movement instead of the black women who could have easily fill that role. was used for political reasons, the universal adoption amongst scholars despite evidence to the contrary created a void in the historical record. by assuming silence, historians have missed important milestones in the civil rights movement that i hope my work captures. the arrest, trial, and conviction of four white men for raping a black college student in tallahassee, florida in 1959 was a watershed event. the willingness of her to testify against her assailant focused national attention on the sexual exploitation of black women the hands of white men. when an all-white jury handed , at notife sentence only broke with southern tradition, and fracture the philosophical and political foundations of white supremacy by challenging the legal relationship based on colonial era laws that i mentioned earlier between sexual domination and racial inequality. for perhaps the first time since reconstruction, southern blacks could imagine state power being deployed in defense of their own personhood. betty jean owens grandmother recognize the importance of the historic decision. she said i have lived to see the day where white men really could be brought to trial for what they did. the tallahassee case led to convictions elsewhere in montgomery, alabama, and raleigh, north carolina, and in burton, south carolina where a white marine received the death penalty for raping a black woman, the first i found, it was overturned on appeal. but in each case, white supremacy faltered in the face of the courageous black woman who testified on their own behalf. john mcrae, the editor of south carolina's white house in and armor newspaper wondered if these conventions pointed to a new day. this forced intimacy goes back to the days of slavery when our women were the cattle property of white man. are we now witnessing the arrival of our women, he said? are they gaining the emancipation they have needed? freedom wasd meaningless without ownership and control of your own body. meantegation inequality nothing if you could not walk down the street unmolested. a year later the freedom struggle was bigger than a hamburger. the 1959 tallahassee case was a major civil rights milestone. 1965 case in hattiesburg mississippi was another milestone historians have missed. she testified about black women and girls vulnerability in the segregated south. babysit for this white family. the white woman called me upstairs. i went upstairs in a hurry so as not to keep the white woman waiting period she said he wants to see you. i looked in the bed and he was laying there among the bedclothes. they were so filthy. i said, what do you want with me? he immediately pulled me down into the bed and had intercourse with me. i was 11 years old. it was my birthday. there was no reason for us to tell our mother or father. they couldn't do anything about it. would talk inls the bathroom about it. never telling our parents. but it happened frequently. >> it left more than physical scars. it left deep psychological wounds. kinds -- i was fascinated by people with david stories.ath moses drowning everybody. i used to go in the woods, and scream, and run into bushes, kick trees and pretend they were white folks. >> you learn how to negotiate your life with white folks. you also learn the fear of so see did with them, how much power they have over you, how they could determine where you continue to live, or whether you died. after two decades of brave testimony, and community efforts to protect them from white sexual violence, a jury , a white norman cannon man to life in prison for raping a black teenager in 1965. newspapers held it as a sign that even mississippi was finally making serious changes. movement,ontgomery the 1965 selma campaign has an important prehistory rooted in sexualized violence that historians have not yet explored. after the freedom summer federal intervention and congressional action left segregationist reeling. and selma the staunchest supporters used the fear of interracial sex and the rhetoric of rape to resuscitate and revive jim crow. they used the sexual mccarthyism to discredit the voting rights act and deed fame the demonstrators who risk their lives in the march. civil rights activists were no longer just outside agitators. or communists. now they were sexual thieves. intent on spreading sexual depravity. it was within that storm and because of that the ku klux klan murdered viola, a white house others byefied embracing the black struggle. accused her of embracing black men. we change the historical markers of the movement. while the voting rights act is often referenced as the book and of the civil rights movement. one of the last barriers fell in 1967. the band laws preventing interracial marriages and loving versus virginia. it was rooted in those colonial era laws i mentioned, and the ban was one of the last vestiges of slavery to fall. only by placing the rubbing -- can it beision properly recognized as a major marker in the civil rights movement. the right of black women to defend themselves from sexual violence was tested in the 1975 trial of joann little. she was a petite 20-year-old african-american inmate in the bill for county jail in washington, north carolina. august, the 62-year-old sheriff intercell. he threatened her with an ice pick and sexually assaulted her. during the attack, she managed to grab the ice pick and proceeded to stab him to death. as she prepared for trial, for murder, supporters from the national organization of women, to the black panther party rally to her defense. it mirrored the eclectic organization that formed to in 1944.aylor the free joann little movement was led primarily by african-american women. in detroit, the free joy and little movement was led by rosa parks. at her trial, defense attorneys tried to paint her as a black jezebel. the attacked her credibility, and portrayed her as a prostitute. they suggested she actually wanted to have sex with the jailer, that she seduced him and killed him in an elaborate plot to escape. story wasey said her thick in a larger context. essayognized to know to decrying the lack of protection for black womanhood and the vulnerability in the system where white man could abuse them. by pointing to decades of abuse in the past, he bore witness to black women's tradition of testimony and their attempt for dignity. after deliberating for over an hour, the jury voted to acquit joann little of murder. as the jury foreman read the verdict she broke into sobs as for lawyers clustered around her. channeling mccrae who wondered if black women head achieved emancipation, she said it feels good to be free. hailed the verdict as a major victory. a boxer.r trade as wasting gloved fist into the air, proclaiming victory for their champ and a triumph over jim crow racism. looking tired and overweight, in crow ists, old jim finally down for the count. if we are to fully understand the role of gender and sexuality in the civil rights movement, and provide what is called a loaded cost accounting of white supremacy, we have to include sexual violence and rape testimony and protests that remain at the volatile core of the modern civil rights movement. thank you for coming tonight. [applause] now we have ambient sound. i said it was time for ambient sound. [laughter] here in the red. >> what was it that got you want to this research in the beginning? danielle: great question. 1998, i was a master student at the university of wisconsin. i was helping my professor clean his office. that is what i was paid to as his assistant. we were listening to npr and about gertrude perkins. i said, who is gertrude perkins? it was so shocking to me that he thought she had something to do with the montgomery bus boycott. i felt compelled to go to the archives and dig up old newspapers, and read about gertrude perkins. , and i didn'tory know what to do with it. it was the first story i found about this issue about sexual violence in the south. there was no way to connect it to the mug am -- the comely bus boycott. i put it aside and didn't really know what to do with it. the couple months later i was working on the tallahassee case. he said this is an interesting story. why don't you look at this. i said ok. i started to look into that case. and i did that for a masters the sis. i put it aside. i finished my masters and went to work for two years and didn't know what to do with it. when i came back to graduate school i said there has to be more to this. i have read about this stuff happening in slavery and i don't know if it ended during after slavery. i started reading black newspapers. they have the stories plastered all over them. i was shocked as a graduate student i have been reading all these history books and none of them talked about what was on the front pages of black newspapers for a decade. i started doing more and more research and slowly but surely little puzzle pieces started to tell me a bigger story, a different story about the civil rights movement. it took a long time. >> in terms of your search, did you have opportunities for interviews, what other sources of data did you have? danielle: thank you. i did interview a number of people. i was lucky to interview recy raped. the woman who was she will be 91 years old this year. she is waiting for justice. she is still waiting for justice. i felt blessed to be able to talk to her. i interviewed a number of other women in birmingham people in montgomery. i use a lot of interviews that , wherend in the archives the historians may have asked question and talked about what happened but they never followed up. i looked at court documents and tried to get court proceedings, trial transcripts and stuff like that. i got a lot of material on the tallahassee case in that regard. i talk to old attorneys on some cases. i have not spoken to any assailants. a couple are still in prison for other crimes. i was afraid to talk to them. it was a lot of digging. through the archives, old newspapers, and talking to people on the ground. >> did the white wives get upset enough with their husbands that that would stop the rapes, or not? >> not that i found. it was a focus of my inquiry. i do think white women's silence made them somewhat complacent in these cases. you see that during slavery in particular. there were white women who who really called out the use of the myth of the black beast as rapist to protect white womanhood. they say you are tired of using in our name. you cannot use it any longer. it is not about us. this is about you. out, were women who spoke most white women kept their mouth shut. >> thank you. thank you for your work. it is so intriguing. and so rich. borncurious, my mother was of an assault by a rate. her family, she was in aberdeen, mississippi. the family fled to cleveland as part of the great migration. i would like to know whether there was any exploration of children born as a result of this sexual violence and how the women themselves and their families dealt with them. thank you. i'm really sorry to hear that. .hat story is very common a lot of women i spoke to will tell that story. particularly about their grandmothers. the cases i studied, as far as i know did not result in any children. but a lot of the black women who were attacked left town. home.en often came back recy taylor did not leave. she stayed where her family was under death threats regularly. , she moved in with her father and he stayed up at night perched in the branches of an old tree with shells and a shotgun. the south asn left part of the great migration because this was one of those push factors, sexual violence. a lot of people stay. for as many women who testified about these crimes many more remain silent and buried the story, and kept on with their daily lives. never expecting justice, hoping to continue along with their daily activities. that is what recy taylor did in many ways. some other women that i've written about, sometimes their stories and in the archives and you don't hear back from them, you don't know what happened for sure. it is up in the air. but the story is not surprising. it is very common. >> i would like to hear more about rosa parks. she was one of the best investigators. what was her rest of her life story, her investigation and what did she say about her feet being tired at the time? like she protested that statement. she said the only tired i was was tired of being mistreated. that is not new history. historyks, her activist is well known i think for scholars of the civil rights movement. the popular presentation is still as this matronly seamstress, as if she didn't do anything else so clothing all day with tired feet. secretary of the montgomery naacp through the montgomery bus boycott. she didn't just take notes during meetings. she was a detective. she traveled the back roads of alabama often at great risk to document the crimes committed against african-americans. she would take those story back to montgomery where she and 80 other people would decide whether or not to launch a campaign or bring legal charges. they used a cruel triage to figure out which cases could be used as a public protest, and which cases they had to keep quiet. politics is the art of the possible. whichad to figure out cases were politically possible to bring forward and launch a public campaign against. of -- the grandchild she was raised to believe in black power and black nationalism. her grandfather believed in armed self-defense and so did she. she spoke at the funeral of robin williams. we forget about that rosa parks, who would give a eulogy for a man who stood up for arms self-defense and was decried during the 1960's for his militancy. she married a man who carried a pistol around town and was one of the organizers of the naacp, and a defender of the scottsboro youth put on trial in jail for many years accused of raping white women on an alabama freight train. she did a lot of things. often her story ends after the bus boycott but she marched in almost every major campaign and then continued her activism in detroit where as i noted, she basically headed the detroit branch of the free gel and little committee. so you here she is continuing to do anti-rape activism. at a time now everyone thinks it is popular because the women's movement has made speak outs feasible. but she had been doing it for a long time. she's not more interesting than textbooks portray her as. and much more militant. she is a radical in her own right. we do her and ourselves 80 the service i really really tired rosa parks and not the militant rosa parks. >> thank you for writing this book. i graduated from langston university in 1966. there two or three men found with her, yet she was killed and they didn't bother the rest of them? mrs. leroux so, she was killed. worth or two or three other young men at the time? danielle: she was in the car with a man, he pretended he was himself, and the clan members who murdered her from their car window, they were in a high-speed chase, they shot at her, they murdered her, her car feared off the side of the road. they got out of the car and went to the car to make sure both passengers were dead. he laid as still as a stone in order to make them believe he was dead. a citizen car pulled away he jumped up and tried to flag down the next car, a car load of snake activists -- snick activists. there were other martyrs but that was her and leroy. >> thank you very much for this refreshing perspective on the civil rights movement. one of the things that drew me ise tonight, to come to this the title of your book. i know that some of the hardest scenes to do in terms of writing history, to decide on a title. you want your title to be catching you, to be attractive. i like the fact that you point to a new history of the civil rights movement. what i wondered about your decision of using rosa parks, instead of recy taylor, if you ought about that, if it crossed recy taylor toy black power. once you got us there, you come up with that. danielle: i'll be very honest. wastop part of the title mine and mine alone. i picked that. my editor chose this subtitle. we worked on it together but i wanted it to just the black women, rape and resistance. she said no, it has to be more than that. we ended up with this long title. it takes up the entire cover of the book. i ended up liking it because it explain what the book was about and it did what you said, what could this be? it drew people in. recy taylor is on the cover. that is her. another question? >> fable, the microphone. -- they will come with the microphone. >> what about joanne little? she wasn't in may, a criminal. she had a shady history. most in her community didn't like her. her parents have a hard time with her. she wasn't the person that people wanted to rally around. she was no rosa parks. the attorneys in her case had to work really hard to present her as a respectable woman who was acting in self-defense as opposed to a premeditated escape plan. for a while she did some speaking engagements with the black panther party, then she their fewifted off, people heard from her again. she was late for appointments, there's an article in the 80's of her being arrested with a sawed off shotgun in her car. and that is that. the archival trail ends. i don't know what happened to person's them. i struggled hard with her case. almost all the other women i have worked on, and his testimonies i have read, i believed. in my core. i wondered for a long time whether or not she was telling the truth. whether or not she was a protagonist i could get behind. ultimately i think listening to , and listening to her attorneys talk about her, and reading the transcripts, i believed her. i don't think that she could have gone up there and pretended her way out of that murder case. she was smart and sly, and a little bit of a criminal mind. but she wasn't making this up. the trial transcript made that clear. i'm grateful they are still available and the judge notes are there. she was an interesting case. know the name. it is probably in my footnotes. i can't remember the title of it. >> a history of black women in america. danielle: something like that. it is in my footnotes. it is an older book but it is full of good information. a good primary source document. >> can you quantify or measure in some way what extent this oppression of black women and violence against them, how much that influence the civil rights movement, did it make it happen sooner or more widespread, more forcefully? can you give us some insight? i think that these cases, and public protests was prominent in the 1940's. they kind of, once a been like this happens, a lot of organizations rally to promote these cases as examples of southern brutality. and examples of un-american behavior, particularly at a time when the united states was war -- at war in europe. these cases were useful political tools and african-americans recognize the chasm between the rhetoric and reality of jim crow. of the 1950's when the politics shifted, and there was this brutal white black/-- black backlash, it made more difficult for african-americans and liberal and leftist organizations to promote these cases as propaganda cases to highlight southern injustice. cases sortd is these of avenue den flow in terms of knowledge, and public propaganda. but that they on the ground, they serve to motivate people to not only join the naacp but often to form a branch of the naacp. was moretories told me about what local people, what ordinary people were concerned about on a day-to-day basis. it was good to get voting rights, very important, crucial to have citizenship recognized. but what would it mean if you could vote that could walk home from church if you were abducted and assaulted? some of this is about what ordinary local people needed to accomplish daily. i think that with a civil rights campaign, it did so in a catalyst. >> as you went through this work , thinking about the world that we live in today, define any residence of what you studied for the world we are living in now? danielle: sure. to understand the way that black women are per trade in popular media, we'd understand this history. i'd are objective subjugated, bodies are sexualized, overly sexualized, by everyone. sexualization, if we look at the way michelle obama is treated today, it is a focus on her body in a way that anyone talking about other first ladies bodies, maybe because they were .ot as toned there has been a lot of , actingt about her uppity, have you ever heard of other first ladies criticized for meeting with royalty? she caught a lot if he were doing that. not because she went on vacation in spain, but i think that what people were saying was that she was playing the lady. and that that was not appropriate for a black woman. it echoed a lot of complaints that i have seen and reconstruction era newspapers and historical studies of the reconstruction which black women who took off the slave uniform and put on a fancy dress were accused of playing the lady. i think there is a lot of resonance and how these stereotypes of black women, and objective vacation of their bodies is continued to this day. it is all over hip-hop, unfortunately. that is why it is not just -- black women seem to be equal opportunity, equally objectified by lots of different people at this point. you see it most explicitly right now in rap videos. gentleman asked the question i was going to ask, based on your insight, i wondered what you think of the duclos cross case. if you looked into that at all, or if you had a different perspective? danielle: i was in the thick of this research when that happened. saidirst time i read it i oh boy, i've heard this story before. a lot. i'll be honest. my immediate thought was that they were guilty. that they did this, that it was part of a long-standing practice, especially among fraternity men. athletes were not immune from object to find women. it smacked of the kind of case study i have been working on. i jumped to conclusions. but the more i read the more i thought there is something not right with this story. not sure what it is. i refrained from talking about i with most people until figured out what really happened. to,conclusion i have come it hasn't really been on my mind. no matter what happened that drove and no matter what those women to be dancers, why were college athletes hiring black women to strip for them as entertainment? i thought it was disgusting. privilege of white and of this southern history. really,can history, that is what i thought. no matter what happened, something really wrong went down. >> with all the reports of rape being used as a weapon of war, particularly in the democratic republic of congo, are you seeing similarities, although the racial component may not be the same? voracious of as attacks as we see around the what ibut i think that have learned from looking at that rate has always been used as a weapon of terror, it continues to be used, even more thatg, we haven't really written about it or talked about it in terms of the racial terrorism that was happening in the united states. i think we need a truth and reconciliation committee to really cleanse ourselves of this about itbe up front and so we can move on to a better future. >> i thought it was interesting hearing you talk about rosa parks as of this militant figure. being part of the nonviolent civil rights movement, was there tension with her on the leadership of it being nonviolent and having these different ideas? danielle: i think there is this myth that everyone was nonviolent and they adhered to go principles but the reality is if you talk to black southerners, and read the civil rights history books, most people had guns. southerners in general. americans like their guns and black people are not aliens. they are americans. there is a long history of people having guns and using them to defend themselves. not only did they use guns to hunt, but to protect themselves when they needed to. you could not portray yourself as a gun toting madmen to public media in the 1950's. mccarthy's sent to committee and blacklisted, deported somewhere.